Symbiotic Mimesis
Paola Estrella
"Symbiotic Mimesis is a project by the artist Paola Estrella in collaboration with Jared Bennett who is a musician, composer, and creative technician. Through speculative fiction, the installation explores both, the desire to be able to become invisible and the need to shine and stand out. Touching on adaptation, transformation, and camouflage concerning social behaviors, it presents a narrative that draws inspiration from magic realism."
"The project consists of a small living room with interactive objects that react to a ten-minute soundscape through a series of light sequences. Every element of the room was designed to create a fictional environment of a human being that fantasizes about living in the ocean. The artist performs in the installation narrating a story that reflects on ideas about pleasure, desire, and becoming. She wears a costume of a jellyfish that reacts to her heartbeat, her voice, and to the soundscape, through a sequence of lights that change colour, rhythm, and intensity as the story is being told. The audio presents a story that reflects on the human experience and interspecies communication through an immersive composition that includes Chelo and experimental underwater sounds."
From Paola Estrella
For this project, I took a voiceover recorded by the artist and applied various effects. Additionally, I composed and designed a soundtrack to accompany the voiceover. I then created a Max/MSP patch to monitor the audio level and transmit data to an Arduino, which controls the lighting for a dynamic effect.